This is the part where they aren't together
by La Fille Avec Le Stylo
Summary: This is the part where they aren't together and Draco walks home alone. Oneshot.


This is the part where they aren't together.

He hasn't seen her since graduation, after all. After he told her they should go their separate ways, and she made sure to hold in her tears until after he had left the room, and her friends stared daggers at him but he thought he was well shot of her. He swaggered out of the room, winking at the girl in the long red dress who had let him go further the night before than _she_ had in an entire year of dating. Good riddance, he had thought, good riddance.

This is the part where he remembers the good times.

He quickly leaves a shop where the now-husband of the then-girl-in-the-long-red-dress is staring him down and ducks into the next shop over, and he swears he can hear her laughter from somewhere in the depths of the dusty dark of the store. The fact that he recognizes her laugh surprises him before he realizes that he hasn't heard it in so long that his mind is probably playing tricks on him. He thinks back to the laugh that he isn't sure he remembers and the times he has heard it, be it because he summoned it or someone else. She was pretty when she laughed, and perhaps still is, but he wouldn't know because he hasn't seen her in years. Long years, yes, but also years that went too fast, fast enough that the distance they have put between now and then has dimmed his memories of her. She wasn't necessarily a beam of light in his dark and hectic and painful existence because he isn't poetic enough for that, but she was something akin to a warm glow, and at the time that was all he could have handled anyway.

This is the part where he remembers the bad times.

There's a woman in a blue coat reading a gossip rag with her picture on the front and the promise of one of her exes disclosing all her most unbearable traits. Did you hear, the woman in the blue coat says to her friend, that Hermione is controlling? It interests him that they use her first name, as if they're friends, as if she associates with people who derive entertainment from gossip rags. I could see that, the friend of the woman in the blue coat replies, she seems the type. She is the type, too, as he well recalls. She's a lot of things that are probably listed in that magazine, but it still bothers him that these women are saying these things and passing these judgments. They don't know her like he does, and even that isn't too well at this point.

This is the part where he sees her again.

He's walking down a winding street in a small town with a long name to visit the relative of a relative of a relative to give them a birthday present when he catches a glimpse of her on the cover of a book. Some people who fought the same fight as her have written autobiographies, turning their tales into epics that took them on book tours and to talk shows on radio stations, but she was never that vain. Her picture is small and in the corner, because after her publisher said her picture had to be on the front she insisted she would only agree to it if the picture were essentially insignificant. Hogwarts: A History, Revised and Updated by Hermione J. Granger.

This is the part where he feels regret.

She keeps her private life as separate from her public life as possible, but sometimes the two bleed into one another despite her best efforts. Miss Granger, Miss Granger, is it true he left you heartbroken? reporters shout as she leaves her office, buzzing like insistent insects. Is it true he was seeing somebody else? She laughs once, twice, three times, not bitterly because she isn't the type to be bitter. Viktor and I are still good friends, the timing just wasn't right, she tells them. An insider tells us that you're heartbroken. I'd love to know who this insider is, she says. And perhaps I am, but I've been heartbroken before, and I'll move on. No more questions, thank you. He doesn't know if she ever cared about him enough to be heartbroken when he left her, but he hopes not because if anybody is going to break her heart they should be more worthy of it than he ever was.

This is the part where he loves her still.

He's walking home alone and thinking about his life in general and what he has done with it. He had always been assured by trustworthy sources that happiness would follow financial success but he's finding these days that that advice was perhaps a bit faulty in that he could buy the entirety of Canada right now but when he thinks of happiness her laugh is all that comes to mind. He doesn't really believe in fourth or fifth or sixth chances, though, and given how he has treated her in the past he reckons he's onto his fourth or fifth or sixth chance, so he leaves her alone. Maybe this is purgatory and at the end of it all, when he's as over her as she is him, he'll be able to move on and live a proper life that doesn't revolve around the laughter of a remarkable woman who at this point barely remembers his name let alone a year of innocent kisses in darkened corridors. Or perhaps someday soon she will remember those innocent kisses and pick up her quill to write a note to her schoolyard crush and he can hold her again. He doesn't deserve her but he hopes this will happen, anyway, because he doesn't deserve a lot of the things he has so who's to say he can't have this particular happily ever after? It's a pointless wish, though, because it will never come to fruition. In a month she will publicly announce her engagement to a fellow elves-rights activist, and half a year later they will be married and blissful beyond his wildest imaginings.

This is the part where Draco walks home alone.


End file.
